Twitter was once named 'Friendstalker'!

Washington: Twitter wasn't always Twitter! Twitter could have been named as 'Twitch', 'Smssy' and even bizarrely - 'Friendstalker', a book about the birth and growth of the microblogging site has revealed.

"There were several different ideas for the name of the service, including 'Twitch', Friendstalker' and 'Smssy'. In the end, of course, it was called 'Twitter', though the company did spend a short amount of time as a vowel-less 'Twttr', Nick Bilton wrote on his blog, quoting from his book 'Hatching Twitter'.

Bilton gained access to emails exchanged between Twitter's founders during the company's early days.

"During the reporting of Hatching Twitter I discovered a number of internal emails that showed the early logo explorations of the company," Bilton said.

Most of the early logos were designed by Biz Stone. The very first version Stone explored was a red jagged oval with off kilter letters cut out in white, Bilton wrote in his blog.

Below the logo sat the tagline, "An Odeo Thingy." Stone described another version in an email as having a "retro Atari vibe."

There was also an option of a large green speech bubble with the word "twitter" written in lowercase.

While Stone explored almost a dozen different designs for the site, it was actually a logo created by Noah Glass, the co-founder of Twitter, which ended up becoming the company's face - at least for a short time.